2022-06-03

When?

Friday, 3 June 2022

10.00 - 11.00 h

Where?

https://lu-se.zoom.us/j/66712778219?pwd=YjJmWk52c0VSbVRZMmdnNVlqK0Uydz09

Which paper are we discussing?

Yucheng Wang et al., Late Quaternary dynamics of Arctic biota from ancient environmental genomics, Nature 600, 86-92 (2021)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04016-x

Who is presenting?

Nikolay

Notes

In this meeting, I am going to summarize my thoughts and experiences on sedimentary / environmental ancient DNA (sedaDNA) studies using the paper of Wang et al., Nature 2021, as an example. This area rapidly grew into an independent branch of palaeogenetics delivering unprecedented information about hominin, plant and animal evolution without bone artifacts. I am going to give a brief overview of a few recent milestone studies, and concentrate on challenges of discovering organisms in sedaDNA samples that typically do not have a clear host. In particular, I will discuss the "single read limit", i.e. the fact that conclusions about presence / absence of an ancient mammalian organism is often made in sedaDNA studies based on a few reads (or a few hundred reads at most) only.